December 2000
President's Desk
Whom Do We Invite to the Party?
By John Birge
jrbirge@nwu.edu
OR/MS seems to be on a roll. In the past year, Business Week rated INFORMS' journal publications as a key business school measure of "intellectual capital," highlighted OR/MS faculty as innovative leaders in new ideas among all business school faculty, and ran a focus section on optimization. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported growth of 50 percent in the number of professionals working as operations research analysts. Several companies with an OR/MS focus have gained considerable market capitalization. Should we seize on this apparent boon, anoint all of those who touch OR/MS as part of the chosen, and invite them to our club within INFORMS? Or should we keep ourselves somewhat distance as the high priests of the discipline and allow only the few beyond the pearly gates into our profession?
As my term as president comes to a close, I am heartened by visible signs of increasing OR/MS awareness, employment and impact, but I am puzzled by our not seeing simultaneous increases in INFORMS membership. Are we implicitly choosing the second choice of focusing our professional organization on an elite core of researchers and high-end practitioners or have we just not yet found the right prescription for reaching the growing ranks of OR/MS users? The other INFORMS officers and I have been contemplating these possibilities and will continue to address this choice in our future strategic planning.
Many of us share a view that OR/MS should be an indispensable tool for decision-making in all reaches of society. All who touch OR/MS should then be part of the flock and worthy of sharing in all the wisdom passed down from our fore-bearers. From this perspective, the boundaries of OR/MS use are limitless. We should reach out to everyone in pursuit in hopes of converting all to the good word of OR/MS. Our table can never be too small to accept more into our fold.
This evangelical form of pursuit gains credence in our sense that OR/MS methodologies are starting to infiltrate a variety of other fields. We hear of chemical firms that build their businesses around process optimization; the ubiquitous ERP firms tout their expertise in optimizing enterprises; medical imaging incorporates optimizing protocols; wireless companies rely on stochastic analyses to differentiate signals. While all these diverse fields use our methodologies, we risk losing identity lest we convert them to our OR/MS faith and show them the paths to righteous application and implementation. From this view, we need to include all these various carriers of OR/MS doctrine and welcome them as equals within our throng.
The mass-appeal argument would lead INFORMS to embrace these multitudes and fulfill its role in being the source of OR/MS information for all who wish to partake of its bounty. We might envision our professional organization with an order of magnitude more members. They would have training from a variety of fields and work in diverse industries. Most would be in industry, using OR/MS techniques in their work but most likely not stretching the envelope of applications or methods.
On the opposite side, others of us might argue that as OR/MS spreads among a broad and diffuse constituency we need to take special care in ensuring that OR/MS remains whole as a discipline. The risk in this view is that the wide variety of application areas can overwhelm OR/MS. If we let these areas take over, then we may lose the core foundation upon which OR/MS was built.
From this outlook, we need to preserve the fundamental tools as the domain of a select group of OR/MS professionals. By keeping the group small, we can ensure that the core areas in model building and solution techniques remain a unified discipline. Concentration on this core can help focus future development and strengthen our foundation.
An analogy for this secret-society form of development might appear in the evolution of statistics study and practice. We can undoubtedly find multiple analyses that show how statistical methods are used more than ever before. Moreover, usage rates are likely to be increasing as well. With the advent of data mining and the Internet, we have reached some form of golden age in statistical data analysis.
Despite the tremendous growth in statistical applications, however, the professional core in statistics remains relatively constant. Professional organizations, such as the American Statistical Association (which may be a second home to many of you), face the same kind of membership challenges as INFORMS. Degree opportunities in the area also seem relatively constant while the demand for short-courses around specific methodologies increases.
INFORMS and our OR/MS professional identity broadly face a challenge in deciding which of these divergent paths or what combination of them to follow in our future development. Should we try to develop some form of evangelical following and reach out to everyone in our sphere of (even partial) influence? Or shall we keep our professional identity tightly held around those who add most directly to the development of fundamental tools and innovative applications? Can we find some middle road that preserves our core but reaches a broader audience? Answers to these questions will shape our development as a profession. The other INFORMS officers and I welcome your opinions and suggestions. Send your thoughts to me (jrbirge@northwestern.edu).
OR/MS Today copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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